Group says NRC rushing nuke-waste report

David McCumber

Published 9:20 pm, Monday, January 21, 2013

WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is rushing a court-ordered evaluation of the risks of storing spent nuclear fuel at the country's nuclear plants, according to two dozen watchdog groups.

In detailed public comments solicited by the NRC, the groups together contended that the agency's two-year timeline for an environmental impact statement on the spent-fuel risks is inadequate.

The NRC "would be well-advised to slow it down, quite apart from anybody's position on nuclear power ... They just don't have the data," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, an electrical and nuclear engineer who is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. He submitted an expert declaration accompanying the comments from the watchdog groups.

Long-term spent-fuel storage at the nuclear plant sites is now a virtual certainty because there is no federal plan for a national repository. Plans for such a repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., were withdrawn by the Obama administration in 2010.

Meanwhile, waste-storage pools at many plants are already filled far beyond their original design capacity, and plant operators have been reluctant to convert to more expensive dry cask storage.

Some pools are leaking radioactive water, and a spent-fuel pool fire could be catastrophic, releasing large amounts of radiation.

Many scientists have sounded the alarm about the possibility of an accident or terrorist strike involving the spent-fuel pools. At Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, concerns over spent-fuel pools continue as Tokyo Electric Power attempts to cover one damaged pool structure, more than a year-and-a-half after the accident.

So the comprehensive risk assessment the groups seek would almost certainly be a powerful weapon in the fight against licensing new plants and relicensing existing plants in the country's aging nuclear fleet.

But that will take more time, and for some of the watchdogs, that time is a double-edged sword. All reactor licensing and relicensing decisions are on hold during the NRC's process, meaning that if the process were to take seven to 10 years, as the groups suggest it might, it could amount to a de facto license renewal for that period.

In 2001 Riverkeeper launched an ongoing campaign to close Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear plant operated by the Entergy Corp., on the Hudson in Buchanan, N.Y. Riverkeeper and others, including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, have asserted that the safety record and health and security risks of the plant, within a 50-mile radius of some 17 million people, make relicensing inadvisable.

Licenses for Indian Point's two operating reactors, Units 2 and 3, expire this September and in December 2015, respectively.

"It's interesting that you don't see a lot of public outcry or complaining from the nuclear industry about this process because they benefit if it takes longer," Musegaas said, referring to the corporations' legal ability to continue operating the reactors past the renewal deadlines -- until the NRC completes the spent-fuel study.

But he added, "While I agree that there's a risk that if this takes too long Entergy will certainly benefit, causing impacts by continuing to run a plant with current risks we think are too great, I do think the process is worthwhile. The risks with spent-fuel pools are enormous. It's the biggest safety and security issue at Indian Point, and at other plants."

According to 2010 statistics gathered by the Department of Energy, Indian Point has more than 1,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored in pools on site.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled last year that the NRC's "waste confidence" rule, a generic presumption that storing spent fuel on nuclear sites is safe, was deficient, and that the possibility of never having a repository had to be considered, along with the risks of leaks and fires in spent-fuel pools.

Environmental lawyer Diane Curran, one of the principal attorneys for the watchdog groups and a key player in the federal case New York v. NRC, admits that a delay benefiting plant operators short-term "is one outcome," but stresses that a thorough environmental evaluation of the spent-fuel storage risks could be a game-changer across the country in licensing cases.

"Ultimately the agency is going to have to make a decision about whether to renew those existing licenses," Curran said, "and to some degree it's an aggregate decision. Do we want to keep generating spent fuel, which carries these costs and risks, for which we have no solution?"